


Newfound Authority

by booksong



Series: SportsFest 2018 Bonus Rounds [5]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Captain kink, M/M, Some sexual innuendo, third year manager Yachi is the MVP, third-year captain Yamaguchi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-22 23:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16607156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/booksong/pseuds/booksong
Summary: “Shouyou and Tobio and the first- and second-years calling him ‘captain’, to hiseternalrelief, did not produce anything but a little flutter of embarrassment and pride (the pride was winning a little more every day).  The title on Hitoka’s tongue made him feel a little warmer, but it was a light feeling, like a jump float serve.  And there were still the previously mentioned brief moments of dissonance, when the word took a few seconds to even register ashis.But it was true that that never happened when it was Kei saying it.  He wasextremelyaware he was being addressed whenever it was Kei saying it.”OR; No one ever prepared Tadashi forthisparticular part of being captain.





	Newfound Authority

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marks/gifts).



> *Over two months after SportsFest, I've finally decided to post up my bonus round entries! They'll all be collected in the 'SportsFest 2018 Bonus Round' series (though each stands completely on its own) if you'd like to check out the others. Many of these pairings and fandoms I've never written for before, so please let me know what you think!
> 
> So it’s Tsukkiyama Day today (and 2 days after Yama’s birthday) and I figured the timing was good to post this one!
> 
> Written for BR 3: Superlatives, with the prompt ‘Most Likely to Have a Captain Thing.’ Marks again, calling me out by hitting on an eternal favorite topic of mine; this is somehow my second fill of SportsFest that involves Yamaguchi discovering a kink, and I’m not sorry. Also, I will sail on the ‘Yamaguchi becomes third-year captain and has a ponytail’ headcanon ship ‘til my last breath, as well as the one where they all call each other by their first names by third year.

It happened less often, these days, but sometimes when Tadashi heard the word ‘captain,’ he still waited for Daichi or Chikara’s voice to answer. There was always that beat of silence before a part of him that often spoke in Kei’s wry tone said, _That’s you_ , and he had to snap out of his own head and into the mantle he’d accepted.

And yet at the beginning of their third year, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible for him to forget. 

**

He’d woken up at five a.m on the first day of practice, tied his shoulder length hair up in a dozen different ways in front of the mirror, practiced serious-but-friendly expressions and various inflections on the words, “Welcome to the Karasuno Volleyball Club!”

“What was all of that roleplaying for?” Kei had asked, when he’d tapped on Tadashi’s doorframe to announce himself an hour later and Tadashi had jumped a foot in the air, somehow more keyed-up than he’d been before a match in a long time. “Don’t tell me all those times I pretended to be a first-year for you were for nothing.”

Tadashi hadn’t had the heart to tell him, then or when they’d actually been doing it, that Kei made a thoroughly unconvincing ‘average first-year prospective volleyball club member’. The only things the experience had really taught him were that a) he would be fully prepared to talk to any new members that _were_ like Kei and b) Tadashi loved his boyfriend, who had patiently read from all thirteen scenario scripts Hitoka had helped write in a calm monotone with very little eye-rolling. 

He’d looked at Kei standing in the doorway, waiting to walk to school with him, and expelled all of his nervous energy in a huge sigh. “What if they don’t like me?” It was the question at the root of all his other captain-related fears, the question that went all the way back to the people who had sneered at him in elementary school and ignored him in middle school.

“As if you aren’t going to be the most approachable third-year in the gym,” Kei had replied, almost bored. 

“Shouyou,” Tadashi had argued halfheartedly as he went to grab his bag, finding himself out of time to be nervous.

“Shouyou is going to approach _them_ , whether they like it or not,” Kei had said darkly, and it had drawn a laugh from him, a real laugh that made the knot in his stomach loosen.

But it was the sensation of Kei’s fingertips brushing the small of his back that he remembered best of all, right outside the gym doors where he’d paused one last time to gather himself. 

“You’ll do just fine. You always deserved it the most.” Kei had murmured lowly, without looking at him, because Kei tended to say the things he meant the most like this--sidelong and small, but with such weight that they always landed like hammer blows to his heart.

And then he’d added, even softer and with an odd, rough tone that scraped along the pit of Tadashi’s belly like it was a matchbook, “... _captain._ ”

And with that one word all of the calm his final moment of pause had bought him had evaporated, and he’d been left with no choice but to slide the gym door open to greet the team, _his_ team, like that, with lightning still zipping down his spine to collect in a hot weight right beneath the skin of his back where Kei had touched.

**

In the weeks that followed, Tadashi had been grateful beyond belief to discover that this reaction did not extend to every use of his new title. Shouyou and Tobio and the first- and second-years calling him ‘captain’, to his _eternal_ relief, did not produce anything but a little flutter of embarrassment and pride (the pride was winning a little more every day). The title on Hitoka’s tongue made him feel a little warmer, but it was a light feeling, like a jump float serve. And there were still the previously mentioned brief moments of dissonance, when the word took a few seconds to even register as _his_. 

But it was true that that never happened when it was Kei saying it. He was _extremely_ aware he was being addressed whenever it was Kei saying it.

The maddening thing was that Kei didn’t always give it that same deliberate inflection as he had the first time. More often than not it was a completely innocuous thing; Kei calling him over to discuss a formation, Kei referring to him in conversation with another player, Kei giving him the floor to address the team after glaring their chatty underclassmen (and Shouyou) into submission.

But every time the word _‘captain’_ left Kei’s mouth it lit his nerves up like a Christmas tree. It was like some grand cosmic joke, or a laughably specific curse out of a fairy tale. _Yamaguchi Tadashi, from this day forward, every time your boyfriend, and **only** your boyfriend, refers to you by this completely innocent and common moniker, you’re going to feel faint and also like you want to climb him like a tree regardless of where you are and what you’re doing!_

He’d never noticed or imagined this being a problem for Chikara or Daichi (he refused to think too hard about certain suspicious exchanges he remembered between Daichi and Sugawara), and he would rather have died than call them up to ask about it. They’d both offered to advise him on any issues that might come up related to the captaincy, but somehow Tadashi was pretty sure they’d meant stuff like mediating arguments or putting together the starting roster, not ‘how do I stop getting turned on when my boyfriend calls me ‘captain’ during practice.’

“I’m pretty sure he’s doing it on purpose,” Tadashi lamented to Hitoka while they were filling water bottles at the tap. She was the only one he’d told about the... _situation_ , because Tobio wouldn’t get it, Shouyou would either not get it at all or get it way too much, and he definitely wasn’t going to burden any of his underclassmen with this knowledge.

“Probably,” Hitoka agreed, because she knew them all very well by now and so understood that Kei was like that. “You could ask him to stop? He would.”

Of course he would, Tadashi knew that. It was just....

“You don’t want him to.” Hitoka nodded, sure of herself, as she capped a bottle. She patted his shoulder and didn’t make fun of the way his cheeks were burning, because she was a good manager and possibly an even better friend. “Well, you haven’t gotten hit in the face with a ball because of it. Yet. That’s something.”

“Is that where I should draw the line?” He’d meant it as a joke, but it came out a little too seriously.

“It’s where _I’ll_ draw the line!” Hitoka set a box of full water bottles in his arms. “I don’t want to get out the first aid kit all the time because Kei-kun found a way to dirty talk you in public.”

“ _Hitoka-chan_.” Without a free hand to shush her or to cover his red face with, Tadashi could only gaze at her pleadingly over the top of the box.

“You’ll take care of it,” she said, patting him again before picking up her own armload of bottles. “After all, you’re our reliable captain, aren’t you Tadashi-kun?” She beamed sunnily at him over her shoulder, and he groaned and followed her back into the cool of the gym.

**

It wasn’t hard to get Kei alone in the changing room, really; he tended to cool down and pack up slowly and deliberately (or at least pretended to), and somehow he was always zipping up his bag just as Tadashi was finishing with his own duties and ready to leave himself. 

So there was no one else around to hear when Tadashi finally tapped into some of his newfound authority and brought it up with his boyfriend.

“Tsukki,” he said, trying to keep his tone light and conversational, as if this were an everyday chat, “You have to call me by my name at practice.”

“Hmm? I already do. ” Kei seemed to be extremely absorbed in folding his towel, and Tadashi wanted to shake him a little. In a mostly affectionate way, but still.

“You have to _only_ call me by my name, I mean. Not... _other things_.”

Kei made a strange coughing sound and when he straightened up Tadashi saw that he was actually grinning, the fierce sharp smile that made his eyes narrow and made Tadashi’s chest feel like it was caving in with fondness. “ _Other things?_ Such as?”

“Tsukki! You know!” Tadashi closed his locker with a deliberate bang, trying to inject some gravity into the proceedings--the fact that he was blushing and fighting his own smile at the same time was probably not helping his case much.

“I don’t see why there’s anything wrong with me using your title, _captain_ ,” Kei said, his grin dimmed back into a smirk now. Even now the word felt like a single finger trailed down his exposed spinal cord. “Unless it bothers you?”

Tadashi briefly contemplated yelling into his own balled-up towel, but decided to throw it at Kei instead. “It doesn’t bother me! I like it _too much_ and you _know_ it and you’re not playing _fair_ , Tsukki!”

“What would be fair, then?” Kei shook out the thrown towel casually and started to fold it as neatly as his own. “Some kind of compromise?”

Tadashi narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He was starting to get the feeling that he was being tricked into something, and he was used to laughing behind his hand while Kei did this to other people, not being on the receiving end. “What are we compromising on, exactly?”

“Well,” Kei said, setting down the perfectly folded towel on his own bag. “You said I shouldn’t call you that at practice anymore. What about when we’re not at practice? Or around other people in general?”

“Oh, well, I guess if _... **oh**_.” Kei raised his eyebrows, and even though he was still smirking blandly, Tadashi could tell he was pleased that Tadashi had caught on.

“That’s...that would be... _fine_ , I think,” Tadashi said, his voice tilting up a half-octave. He was suddenly extremely aware that here, in the empty locker room, they were very much ‘not around other people in general’ right now.

Kei, nodded, satisfied, which more or less confirmed Tadashi’s hunch that he’d been outmaneuvered here. Still, he couldn’t feel too bad about it. After all, compromises were supposed to be important in relationships, and this one...well, it had some good points. For both of them.

“Well, should we head home then?” Kei shouldered his bag, and then walked over to press the square of Tadashi’s towel to his chest, right over his sped-up heartbeat. He left his splayed hand on top of it for a moment, eyeing Tadashi thoughtfully. “I thought we could look over some of those new formation diagrams together, _captain_ ,” he murmured, and Tadashi wondered if Kei could feel the way his breath stuttered right through the layers of fabric.

“Sounds good, Tsukki,” he managed, and wondered if Kei had _any_ idea how good. He probably did.

And because Kei, despite everything, had always been good at keeping his word, he stopped calling Tadashi ‘captain’ the very next day.

At practice, anyway.


End file.
